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The other night, we were channel-surfing and hit upon the Miss America pageant. The contestants were asked questions, and the one on the screen was What year did women get the vote in the United States?'' The answer, according to the pageant judges, was 1920.
The correct answer is a little more complicated. Women began voting in Wyoming Territory in 1869, and began voting in presidential elections after Wyoming became a state in 1890. Colorado women first voted in the 1896 presidential election, as did Utah's and Idaho's. Women from the Mountain West were voting for president long before the official date'' of 1920. Indeed, by then Montana had already elected a woman, Jeanette Rankin, to the U.S. Congress.
You didn't have to watch the pageant questions to see how we get ignored here. Just watch the short promos for what's coming later on a given network, be it liberal or conservative. The announcement will say something like 11 Eastern, 10 Central.'' Once in a while there will be an 8 Pacific.'' But never a 9 Mountain.'' As far as the national media are concerned, our time zone doesn't exist.
Our time zone is the network equivalent of flyover territory. But in a presidential election year, we might also ask a related question: Is the Mountain Time Zone also a political nonentity? Do the presidential campaigns need to pay attention to us?
There's no simple answer to that question. Thanks to the arithmetic of the electoral college, we have more clout than our population warrants. The extreme example of this imbalance comes from comparing Wyoming, with about 500,000 residents in the 2000 census, to California, with 34 million.
California gets 55 electoral votes -- one for each of its 53 U.S. representatives, and two for its two senators. Wyoming has only one representative, and thus three electoral votes. Do the math, and each Wyoming electoral vote stands for about 170,000 people, while each California electoral vote stands for 618,000 people.
In other words, a Wyoming voter has nearly four times as much influence on the presidential election as a California voter. This extends, though not to such an extreme, throughout the Mountain Time Zone. Nationally, the average electoral vote stands for 526,000 people, but here, only 437,000.
So if the typical Mountain Time voter has 20 percent more clout that the typical American voter, why aren't presidential candidates competing to accommodate us -- promising an end to fee demo'' on public land, catching up on deferred maintenance at our national parks, increasing PILT funds to rural counties, that sort of thing?
For starters, that electoral-college arithmetic favors states with small populations. But even if we weight the scales that way, we're still lightweights. The Mountain Time Zone has only 37 of the 535 electoral votes -- less than 7 percent. California, as mentioned, has 55; Texas alone has 34, and New York has 31.
That is, a candidate can get just about as many votes from one big state, and carrying that single state would not require the travel-time and multiplicity of media markets that campaigning across seven states would demand.
So, we don't offer much bang for the buck.'' Candidates also need to spend their resources where they'll make a difference. You won't see the Bush campaign spending much in Texas this year, even though it's a big state with many electoral votes. Bush could carry Texas even if he announced plans to raze the Alamo because it was a threat to homeland security, and on that account, John Kerry isn't going to spend much time there, either. The reverse holds for Democratic strongholds like New York and California.
States need to be competitive to get attention. New Mexico is the only Mountain state that a Democrat carried last time around, and then by only 366 votes. Pollsters say it, Arizona, and Colorado might be competitive this year -- and both Bush and Kerry are frequent visitors.
But you won't see much of either elsewhere in the Red Zone West, because the Republicans are so dominant. In 2000, Bush got 60 percent of the Monana vote, 68 percent in Utah, and 71 percent in Idaho and Wyoming. Non-competitive states, especially ones with few electoral votes, aren't worth the trouble for either party's candidate.
That may explain America's current political geography. The Republican Party may have been founded by New Englanders and Midwesterners, but it is today a Southern party, stretching from Texas east to Virginia and Florida.
The Democratic Party is a coastal party, especially if you count the Great Lakes as a coast. Neither needs to do much with the Mountain Time Zone, except to either take it for granted or write it off. And in neither case are they going to pay much attention to those of us on the ground in flyover country; their real constituencies are elsewhere, just like the network audiences.
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